Dagger Suggestions

[Teratus.2859]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:I'm confused by your statements.. they seem to counter one another.Overhealing in most encounters, yet the mechanic is only useful in a very small number of encounters?That doesnt make sense to me sorry.

What he/she mean is that life siphons might be good at healing but that doesn't mean that the mechanism itself is attractive in term of effectiveness. To put it simply it's not a valuable tool in group setting unless you face foes that cannot be critically hit.

Yes, that's the general idea. heal over time skills with cooldowns aren't that useful based on how this game is designed because most the damage you take that actually kills you in this game isn't applied over time ... it's direct, single attacks. Even if there was more DoT's in this game, Dagger 2 would simply cancel the damage over the time of the attack ... then what? The length of a battle is certainly going to be much longer than any HoT from a offensive weapon skill can provide.

I think the thing that is offensive to me is that there are MUCH better ways to do what a dagger necro does and not use daggers. Even if life siphoning was an effective PVE strategy to be sustainable ... Reaper does it much better, so the question is why is there so much overlap between two build strategies where one is obviously kitten ... I know the answer to that will be 'theme' because not everyone wants to play a reaper, but no one should be promoting a necro dagger build because of it's capability to be 'effective' in PVE. If you can hit 1 ... you're effective in 90% of the PVE in this game ...

If someone wants to promote a build as 'effective' in PVE ... show me how it can solo most of the Mastery points in HoT ... then we can talk. I know dagger necro doesn't do that. If people want to understand what effective means in PVE, check out OWD Mirage or play a minion Scepter necro.

Well I can say I have soloed most if not all the HP bosses in HoT.But that was a long time ago.

After reading your post though I think you may have misread or understood my defense of Dagger 2.The Life Siphon as a dedicated heal skill thing is more of an emergency situation rather than a constant thing I am doing in combat.The vast majority of the time I don't need to swap into Dagger and use it.. I get more than enough incoming sustain from other forms of lifesteal, largely from just the 10+ minions I have feeding it to me constantly.For the most part I am using nothing but Greatsword and Shroud skills but if I take a lot of spike damage or get hit with a big condi burst, Then I swap to Dagger, hit a dark pact to bleed myself and then life siphon a big chunk of that damage back up in a few seconds rather than sacrifice my blood fiend to heal.The reason for doing that is 2 fold.Dagger 2 heals more than sacrificing the minion, and Dagger 2 has a shorter CD than sacrificing the minion does.Plus I also have the additional benefit of having the minion to sacrifice if my Dagger 2 gets evaded, blocked or doesn't heal up enough damage if say I get hit really hard again in too short a time frame.That's how I use the Dagger and what I ment by having it as a dedicated heal skill, and it's been very effective for me for many years.

Hopefully that will clear up anything that might have been taken wrong in my other posts, I know I have a problem clarifying myself clearly sometimes and for that I do apologise, I have poor social skills and simply cannot help it >.<

[Infusion.7149]

Nothing personal, but that's a low number of PvP games and 13K is a low DPS even for a support build that isn't in harrier gear if you're using all the buffs without food.

As KrHome stated above, if you're doing instanced content you're better off just running marauder gear with one or two utilities for defense or even plaguedoctor scourge (since power doesn't make up much of the damage).

Dagger needs help in instanced content where it's one boss fight: it's not going to be very useful for openworld , WvW, or fractals due to lack of cleave.

[Lahmia.2193]

@Anchoku.8142 said:

@Infusion.7149 said:You know dagger could be more of a melee range support weapon. It's already used on heal scourge, there's no reason they cant slap some party/squad healing on it at least for PVE.

I agree MH dagger could be a choice instanced PvE support weapon but Arenanet clearly disagrees. Necromancer should not have group support options because it is selfish according to the developers. Sharing the siphon heal and damage buffs at some fraction of the Necromancer's sustain makes sense but Vampyric Presence sets a very low bar.

Tacking heal share from Dagger 2 onto Quickening thirst would be alright. That way it isn't a drastic overhaul but allows those running our support traitline some extra party healing.

[Teratus.2859]

@Infusion.7149 said:Nothing personal, but that's a low number of PvP games and 13K is a low DPS even for a support build that isn't in harrier gear if you're using all the buffs without food.

Dagger needs help in instanced content where it's one boss fight: it's not going to be very useful for openworld , WvW, or fractals due to lack of cleave.

I wasn't a pvp player that's why, still aint although I do like a bit of WvW these days.. but spvp I don't bother with at all.The only reason I used W/L stats is because I can't access K/D stats.I do know that in many of those games I had least deaths and in a number of them no deaths at all, but I can't prove that with data because there is no way I know of to get it.Best I have is the W/L stats which yes are a small number of overall pvp games, again not a pvp player, but despite that I still had a disproportionately high win count for someone who was a total pvp noob at the time.. I never played WvW back then either just for the record.It was entirely because of the build and other pvp players being unfailiar with how to deal with a high sustain tank in PvP not! my skill level as a player.

Cleave is actually one thing I promoted myself, I was very much against removing the 3 target limit on dagger all those years ago and remain a critic of that decision to this day.In terms of 1v1 situatons though it's just weak in damage.. as a life force generating weapon it's pretty decent and the life steal is fine if used in combination with other lifestealing mechanics like minions or vampire effects which is ultimately what I think Anet had in mind for lifesteal anyway.No single source of sustain should be enough to fully outheal damage, if that were the case everyone would be running around on unkillable glass canons.

I don't use harriers on the build btw, it's full soldier, no Healing power investment.As I pointed out too I can't get a fully accurate dps check since the golem can't account for my total minions (no max rise) or the 100% crit chance I can have in real play ergo i'm not getting all my realistic crit damage and benefiting from all the ferocity buffs.I wasn't using food nor do I have a fine tuned rotation either.. as I pointed out I don't like min-max gameplay.

Only way I can get accurate info is in actual group content using 3rd party software which I am not willing to use or install on my computer.At best I can estimate between 10-15k dps average based off the golems single target damge.. Too many unknown variables and the golem at best is to be used as an estimate for all builds and nothing more.When I was looking up dps benchmarks I found a lot of comments on reddit etc that stated things like acceptable or realistic numbers in combat and one common thing I saw was people stating that even expected 30K dps glass builds realistically do around 10-15k dps in actual combat for a multitude of reasons. and that falls into the acceptable range for some of them (Ele was often the class named in most of them)And theres also the big fact that this is a Necromancer build, ergo the constant bottom of the barrel DPS class in the game according to most people.

[Obtena.7952]

@Teratus.2859 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:I'm confused by your statements.. they seem to counter one another.Overhealing in most encounters, yet the mechanic is only useful in a very small number of encounters?That doesnt make sense to me sorry.

What he/she mean is that life siphons might be good at healing but that doesn't mean that the mechanism itself is attractive in term of effectiveness. To put it simply it's not a valuable tool in group setting unless you face foes that cannot be critically hit.

Yes, that's the general idea. heal over time skills with cooldowns aren't that useful based on how this game is designed because most the damage you take that actually kills you in this game isn't applied over time ... it's direct, single attacks. Even if there was more DoT's in this game, Dagger 2 would simply cancel the damage over the time of the attack ... then what? The length of a battle is certainly going to be much longer than any HoT from a offensive weapon skill can provide.

I think the thing that is offensive to me is that there are MUCH better ways to do what a dagger necro does and not use daggers. Even if life siphoning was an effective PVE strategy to be sustainable ... Reaper does it much better, so the question is why is there so much overlap between two build strategies where one is obviously kitten ... I know the answer to that will be 'theme' because not everyone wants to play a reaper, but no one should be promoting a necro dagger build because of it's capability to be 'effective' in PVE. If you can hit 1 ... you're effective in 90% of the PVE in this game ...

If someone wants to promote a build as 'effective' in PVE ... show me how it can solo most of the Mastery points in HoT ... then we can talk. I know dagger necro doesn't do that. If people want to understand what effective means in PVE, check out OWD Mirage or play a minion Scepter necro.

Well I can say I have soloed most if not all the HP bosses in HoT.But that was a long time ago.

After reading your post though I think you may have misread or understood my defense of Dagger 2.The Life Siphon as a dedicated heal skill thing is more of an emergency situation rather than a constant thing I am doing in combat.The vast majority of the time I don't need to swap into Dagger and use it.. I get more than enough incoming sustain from other forms of lifesteal, largely from just the 10+ minions I have feeding it to me constantly.For the most part I am using nothing but Greatsword and Shroud skills but if I take a lot of spike damage or get hit with a big condi burst, Then I swap to Dagger, hit a dark pact to bleed myself and then life siphon a big chunk of that damage back up in a few seconds rather than sacrifice my blood fiend to heal.The reason for doing that is 2 fold.Dagger 2 heals more than sacrificing the minion, and Dagger 2 has a shorter CD than sacrificing the minion does.Plus I also have the additional benefit of having the minion to sacrifice if my Dagger 2 gets evaded, blocked or doesn't heal up enough damage if say I get hit really hard again in too short a time frame.That's how I use the Dagger and what I ment by having it as a dedicated heal skill, and it's been very effective for me for many years.

Hopefully that will clear up anything that might have been taken wrong in my other posts, I know I have a problem clarifying myself clearly sometimes and for that I do apologise, I have poor social skills and simply cannot help it >.<

My goal here is to separate your successful use of Dagger from the discussion. I don't question your success but it's not relevant to how dagger is designed. If your success is a general indication of it's performance, that is an unfortunate situation because I don't think it will EVER get improvements. A heal over time attached to a offensive weapon skill is just not widely applicable ... so you get a weapon that has an attack that is very situational.

Honestly, I believe the GENERAL trend is that the less capable a player is, the more they love and rely on Dagger 2. It's simply not good enough of a skill to rank the necro dagger build amongst the highest OW PVE performers. From your post, it sounds like it's more likely you are successful because of your use of minions than the dagger ... and that is more aligned to my experience as well.

[Teratus.2859]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:I'm confused by your statements.. they seem to counter one another.Overhealing in most encounters, yet the mechanic is only useful in a very small number of encounters?That doesnt make sense to me sorry.

What he/she mean is that life siphons might be good at healing but that doesn't mean that the mechanism itself is attractive in term of effectiveness. To put it simply it's not a valuable tool in group setting unless you face foes that cannot be critically hit.

Yes, that's the general idea. heal over time skills with cooldowns aren't that useful based on how this game is designed because most the damage you take that actually kills you in this game isn't applied over time ... it's direct, single attacks. Even if there was more DoT's in this game, Dagger 2 would simply cancel the damage over the time of the attack ... then what? The length of a battle is certainly going to be much longer than any HoT from a offensive weapon skill can provide.

I think the thing that is offensive to me is that there are MUCH better ways to do what a dagger necro does and not use daggers. Even if life siphoning was an effective PVE strategy to be sustainable ... Reaper does it much better, so the question is why is there so much overlap between two build strategies where one is obviously kitten ... I know the answer to that will be 'theme' because not everyone wants to play a reaper, but no one should be promoting a necro dagger build because of it's capability to be 'effective' in PVE. If you can hit 1 ... you're effective in 90% of the PVE in this game ...

If someone wants to promote a build as 'effective' in PVE ... show me how it can solo most of the Mastery points in HoT ... then we can talk. I know dagger necro doesn't do that. If people want to understand what effective means in PVE, check out OWD Mirage or play a minion Scepter necro.

Well I can say I have soloed most if not all the HP bosses in HoT.But that was a long time ago.

After reading your post though I think you may have misread or understood my defense of Dagger 2.The Life Siphon as a dedicated heal skill thing is more of an emergency situation rather than a constant thing I am doing in combat.The vast majority of the time I don't need to swap into Dagger and use it.. I get more than enough incoming sustain from other forms of lifesteal, largely from just the 10+ minions I have feeding it to me constantly.For the most part I am using nothing but Greatsword and Shroud skills but if I take a lot of spike damage or get hit with a big condi burst, Then I swap to Dagger, hit a dark pact to bleed myself and then life siphon a big chunk of that damage back up in a few seconds rather than sacrifice my blood fiend to heal.The reason for doing that is 2 fold.Dagger 2 heals more than sacrificing the minion, and Dagger 2 has a shorter CD than sacrificing the minion does.Plus I also have the additional benefit of having the minion to sacrifice if my Dagger 2 gets evaded, blocked or doesn't heal up enough damage if say I get hit really hard again in too short a time frame.That's how I use the Dagger and what I ment by having it as a dedicated heal skill, and it's been very effective for me for many years.

Hopefully that will clear up anything that might have been taken wrong in my other posts, I know I have a problem clarifying myself clearly sometimes and for that I do apologise, I have poor social skills and simply cannot help it >.<

My goal here is to separate your successful use of Dagger from the discussion. I don't question your success but it's not relevant to how dagger is designed. If your success is a general indication of it's performance, that is an unfortunate situation because I don't think it will EVER get improvements. A heal over time attached to a offensive weapon skill is just not widely applicable ... so you get a weapon that has an attack that is very situational.

That's a fair argument, although I think that some people having success with the weapon does have to be considered because of balance.If Life Siphon did recieve a big heal and damage buff then people who have builds like mine who already get good, reliable use from the skill would become in a sense, OP as a result.Anet has to be very careful in this case to not make tank builds capable of say, outhealing and soloing certain high level content.. otherwise you would see a large spike in people making these builds and the buff being corrected by a signifcant nerf again.

Common playstyles cannot be soley considered when buffing or nerfing things, Anet has to look at all potential builds and combinations that these buffs and nerfs will effect.. to ensoure they don't fix a problem for like 95% of common builds but make the rare 5% of them become essentially Gw2 godmode.If that's even a remote possibility then Anet cannot allow it to happen.. but at the same time they can't just kill off those builds either as that wouldn't be fair to those who enjoy them.

Honestly, I believe the GENERAL trend is that the less capable a player is, the more they love and rely on Dagger 2. It's simply not good enough of a skill to rank the necro dagger build amongst the highest OW PVE performers. From your post, it sounds like it's more likely you are successful because of your use of minions than the dagger ... and that is more aligned to my experience as well.

Yes the Dagger is as I mentioned a backup weapon, not a primary one and the way I utilize the heal I get from it functions exactly like how every other class in the game would use a dedicated healing skill.Most people press 6 to heal, I press 2.. that's literally the only difference there and the only trade off I have to make is a weapon swap rather than sacrificing a valuable minion.And yes the bulk of my incoming sustain is coming from the minions which I also openly admitted as well, but they only do so much of it.The Dagger heal when combined with minion lifesteal is significant and it works as a decent counter to large spike damage which it can heal up very quickly and very often thanks to the low cooldown on Life Siphon (10 seconds default, 6,7 seconds if used while health is above 75%) which is for the most part, significantly shorter than every dedicated heal in the game (Most are between 20-30 seconds CD and a handful around 15-18 seconds CD)Dagger 2 also heals more than sacrrificing the Blood Fiend too.. so it's a win win as the Minion is far more useful alive and as I pointed out before can also be sacrificed as a second dedicated heal if there is a need to do so effectively giving me a big almost 9K heal combined.Using base numbers:With bleeding Dagger 2 heals by about 4810 health providing the whole attack lands (which it does very often on NPC enemies since enemies in Gw2 are pretty stupid)Sacrificing the Blood fiend heals by 3,960 health, that's almost 1k less healing and somtimes more than twice the cooldown as well.And that's all on top of all the lifesteal and healing coming in from my attacks, my rune, sometimes food too and every single minion I have out.If you can't see why that is an appealing and effective combination then I really don't know how I can convince you to see why I defend this skill.

The other small benefits Dagger offers is quicker life force regen while im swapped out of Greatsword which is also useful for me since most of my damage output comes from the Reaper shroud, the quicker I can get back into shroud the higher my damage output will be which is better when I do run with groups.And depending on my offhand chocice, I can eithe get bonus CC, Lifesteal AoE with Warhorn or extra Vun and Boonstrip with Focus.. depending on what im fighting and with how many people matters there though.Warhorn better in groups, Focus for solo play.

I don't rank dagger as a "highest OW PVE performer" as you mentioned though..As a straight up damaging weapon I am in full agreement with everyone that it needs a cleave and a to be restored to a 3 target limit, I have mentioned this many times on the forums over the years as well and daggers damage has never been something I have argued against, it is poor and i'd gladly have it buffed as well.

It's the lifesteal potential of the weapon which I end up arguing with people over because of how much experience I have using it.I have to point out that for the majority of Necro builds and players the "underwhelming lifesteal" complaints about dagger 2 are often made while completely overlooking how not underwhelming the skill is to tanky high sustain builds like the one I have enjoyed playing for quite literally most of this games lifespan now.As I mentioned above Anet has to consider the potential of all builds and playstyles and that includes mine.. becuase it exists in the game.

This ultimatley means that Dagger 2's biggest problem isn't so much that it's an underwhelming skill, which it is admittedly for most Necro players.But rather that it's that most Necro players either don't know how to get the most use out of the skill or in some cases simply do not want to make their builds to do that.That said though, Game mode is a massive, massive factor in this as well.

While I used my old variant of the builds PvP history in defense of the lifesteal I fully acknowledge that it in no way works there today.A lot has changed in the game since then and a lot of my success was down to what I also openly mentioned above, people simply not knowing how to deal with such a tanky high sustain build at the time.Which I think we can all agree on today, Being tanky and having high sustain is one of the things the Necromancer class is really good at in Gw2.It's just that for a lot of people, specially those more focused on DPS in Gw2, they never played into that strength those years ago, where as a small number of us did and have enjoyed playing it for a long time.

[ZDragon.3046]

@Yasai.3549 said:Suggestion 1 :

• Life Siphon moved to Auto, remains largely the same and additionally restores 0.5% Life force per damage tick
• New skill 2 which tethers the player to nearest 5 targets in 600 range, pulsing damage and Bleed for 3 ticks, then applying Immob on the last tick.
• Dark Pact remains mostly the same

Gives the Dagger more kiting potential, and give it a fair Immob condition.

I kind of like the first option here but would it really be worth doubling up on immobs on a single weapon i dont think any other weapon has that kind of power.

Also maybe consider making dark pact a mark instead of a single targeted skill?Same thing with offhand dagger 5? Turn this into a mark that triggers the skill instead?

Imo marks should be in more places than just on the staff.